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Dariusz Czaja, Life
or Non-transparency. Beyond the Anthropology of Culture
The category of “culture" is one of the most frequently used (and abused)
terms in anthropology. Its application is by no means epistemologically innocent but upon each occasion embroils
the researcher into a wider context of methodological and even
philosophical conjectures. Its employment in an anthropological
context carries a frequently unconscious burden of positivistic
premises, despite universal declarations about an anti-positivistic
breakthrough. As a rule, “culture” relates to that which can be “objectively”
examined and proven, and penetrates those spheres which science
deemed suitable to study.
The author suggests a return to the rather
forgotten category of ,,life"
conceived by Wilhem Dilthey as well as enlivening the conceptions
expounded by representatives of the so-called philosophy of life (Bollnow, Misch, Simmel). Moreover, he demonstrates that
“life” is a category much more capacious than culture despite
the vaccilating nature of meanings, and much more useful in
interpretative anthropology. It extracts from examined reality not only the
semiotic aspect but also the existential and metaphysical dimension.
By depicting both the simplicity and convoluted nature of the
category of “life” the author refers to Life.
A Manual, the novel by George Perec, and upon the
basis of several
selected motifs presents his theses about the non-transparent nature
of life envisaged as a horizon that still evades scientific thought.
Antoni
Kroh, The
Old
River
Valley.
The Prince. Telephones. The Clock
Three recollections, three refined and
concise “pictures from the past” comprise a fragment of a book
whose author referred to his own biographical memory. The select
examples exceed mere sentimental “memoirs”. The author offers
the reader not only a delectable anecdote and a glimpse of the
manners and morals of the past, but also demonstrates the way in
which History becomes amazingly intertwined with the private and
unique history of an individual.
Aleksandra
Melbechowska-Luty Akin
to a Jewel in His Crown
A me stresso is
the title of an exhibition of paintings by Jacek Sempoliński
organised in the Warsaw Zachęta Gallery and crowning the heretofore
oeuvre of the artist. The review discusses works featured in the
showrooms and comments on the form of the display - impressive,
well-conceived and rendering the exhibition a theatrical spectacle of sorts. The second part of the text
presents Sempoliński's book Władztwo i slużba (Dominion
and Service), a collection of 89 texts from 1958-2001, brilliant
“miniatures” about art written in a definitive and concise
style.
Victor Turner Are there
Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?
This essay is a further step in the process of exploring some of the
interweavings of ritual and theatre, a process Victor Turner had
been exploring for some time. In 1980, Turner articulated very
clearly what he saw as the goal of
his writings. He stated: “Cultures are most fully
expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and
theatrical performances. A performance is a dialectic of flow, that
is, spontaneous movement in which action and awareness are one, and
reflexivity, in which the central meanings, values and goals of a
culture are seen in action, as they shape and explain behavior. A
performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the
uniqueness of particular cultures. We will know one another better
by entering one another's performances and learning their grammars
and vocabularies”. In Are there universals of performance in
myth, ritual, and drama? Turner presented his Utopian vision of
world community based on mutual respect and enjoyment of cultural
differences, exchanges of feelings as well as ideas, and the
increasing ability of people to experience and re-experience. He
discussed a characteristic developmental relationship from ritual to
theatre, and he presented the relationship of both to social drama.
All figures in this essay express
schematically some of these connections.
Jerzy S. Wasilewski Travelling
Ethnology (III) The Reindeer-People, the Taiga-People, just People...
The Caatans - a formerly isolated group of
reindeer-breeders in the north of Mongolia. Some 300 people at the
edge of extinction. Loosing the feeling of their ethnic identity (they
are originally a group of Tuvans, who have escaped from Soviet Tuva
in 1944), they call themselves simply “Taiga-People”, whereas
the Mongols label them “Reindeer-People”. Political and
economical changes of the 90-s made them available for research,
tourism - and vulnerable to the impacts of a strange modernisation,
being in fact a “retrogression to tradition”. After a total
collapse of planned economy, forced sedentarisation, mandatory
education and health protection system, they are left alone, facing
most serious problems of biological and cultural survival.
Unsupported, they returned to the old nomadic lifestyle, based on
reindeer breeding and hunting, in tipilike tents. Old folkways are
reintroduced. After the removal of the political ban, a renaissance
of shamanism is noticeable. Four Caatan
/ Tuva shamans are active, their silhouettes are
presented and their seances described in the paper.
Filip Taranienko
Music as Speech
and Speech as Music: an Essay
for Comprehension of the Same Nature of Both Activities
In this essay the author tries to
explain the similarity between the activities called in our
everyday life “speech” and “music”. He suggests that the
border between them is fluid. He passes over all the opinions
dividing “language” and “speech”, considering all language
firstly as a spoken or imagined word. He analyses some moments from
the whole of human history which can tell us about people's
attitudes towards speech and music, such as inventions of musical
and linguistic writing systems, opinions of some philosophers, poets
and musicians, and finally liturgical usage of languages, being for
him a very important point. Liturgy is considered as a pattern
situation for all other human activities connected with
communication, speech and art, and in this way also as a base for
analysis of the nature of examined notions. The text is divided into
two parts: the first part examining the problem from the linguistic
point of view and the second from the musical one. The first part
concerns the intonation in everyday, poetic and liturgical language
and the Semitic invention of alphabet, changed and accepted by
Greeks. The second one contains some remarks about oral tradition in
liturgical music and the first attempts to write it down; it
presents some reflections of contemporary musicians executing early
music, in particular medieval and baroque, trying to perform it in
conformity with aesthetics of the times. The two parts are separated
by a short reflection on the nature of memory, an indispensable
condition of both music and speech.
The conclusion is a moral one. It avoids
repeating the introductory thesis. Of course, the problem needs some
more reflection to be better understood.
Piotr
Machul, The
Gardzienice Manuscripts
In this text, referring to the
“Gardzienice” Centre for Theatrical Practice - the prime theme
of the previous issue of “Konteksty” - the author tries to
analyze, upon the basis of select examples, the “Gardzienice manuscripts”, i.
e. the endeavours made by actors to create their own musical record
in the course of theatrical ventures. Music was registered, at least
partially, from the very onset of the “Gardzienice” group, but
attempts at registering it grew intensified at the time of work on
the latest spectacle - Metamorphoses after Apuleius. Upon the
request of Maciej Rychły, responsible for the musical score of this
particular production, almost every actor created an auteur musical
record. The “manuscripts" are not, however, a universal code
for deciphering classical music. Nor are they an ultimately defined
and meticulously devised code, but remain merely an extremely
interesting and original attempt at recording certain elements of
the actors' training - predominantly musical and vocal. The
“Gardzienice manuscripts” make it possible, at least to a degree,
to follow the paths of musical motifs rendered indelible centuries
ago on stone or papyrus, described in Martin West's Ancient Greek
Music, and partially reconstructed for the needs of the
“Gardzienice” Theatre.
Robert
Darnton, Introduction to the Great Cat Massacre
The renowned American historian proposes a
masterly historical analysis of an incident that took place in
eighteenth-century France. At the end of the 1730s a Parisian
printer's workshop became the site of an unprecedented all-night
massacre of cats
committed by apprentices. In his meticulous reconstruction of the
whole event Darnton tried to explain the reasons for the incident,
its determinants and potential. Since the author is an historian of
mentality his analysis is not limited to a mere critique of sources
and the establishment of “what really took place”. By making
extensive use of ethnographic sources and documenting the folklore
backdrop of the demonisation of cats as well as their links with
magic and sorcery, Darnton convincingly shows why the cats suffered
their cruel fate and why a duel between the workers (plebeians) and
the employer (a representative of the propertied class) assigned the
animals the role of a substitute victim.
An excellent example - alongside works by
Le Roy Ladurie or Ginzburg - of a creative use of the combined
instruments of a historiographer and an anthropologist, the book
remains a standard specimen of micro-history and historical
anthropology.
"Carnivals
in Culture" was the name given to a conversatorium (seminar)
held in 1999 by
Wojciech Dudzik
at the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University, and devoted
to examining carnival traditions all over the world, the social
functions of this festivity and its assorted contexts. The accepted
wide anthropological perspective exceeds far beyond the traditional
ethnographic interpretation of the carnival as a festival which
belongs to the annual, folk ritual cycle. The material presented in
this issue under an identical joint title: “Carnivals in Culture”
- is an attempt at an initial summary of three years of seminar work,
and at indicating exemplary problems considered during the weekly discussions
held by the participants of the conversatorium. The published texts
- translations from assorted languages (pertinent Polish literature
is exceptionally sparse in this respect) - were selected in such a
manner as to demonstrate as broadly possible various phenomena via
concrete examples, to refer to theoretical interpretations
functioning in science, and to present new research perspectives
which could inspire further studies.
The first article: Carnivals' Festivities, Play Spectacles by
Wojciech Dudzik
recalls briefly the history of the Polish usage of the term “carnival”,
the place of the festival, and the original forms of its celebration.
The author goes on to indicate research perspectives (the theories
of festivity, play and spectacle) and trends of reflection relating
to the carnival conceived as a total holiday. The article poses
questions that must be answered in order to come closer to
understanding the essence of the phenomenon, i. e. in what manner
does the periodical “upside down” treatment of the world
influence social order and the consciousness of the participants of
the event? What are the consequences of the presence or absence of
carnival ideas and practices for social life in a given country? How
are we to explain growing global interest in the active practicing
of carnival traditions, observed in recent years? Is there a
dependence between the degree of the institutionalisation and
formalisation of culture, on the one hand and the diversity and
intensity of the carnival, on the other? Finally, why have carnival
customs and rites almost completely disappeared in contemporary
Poland?
Suzanne
Chappaz-Wirthner, the Swiss author of the article From
the History of
Research on
the Carnival (translated from French by
Łada Jurasz-Dudzik) considers the most important theories of the
carnival, dividing them into two groups: conceptions which recognise
the carnival as a festivity of pagan origin, and those which grant
it the dimension of a Christian holiday. Among the former she
recalls opinions voiced by mediaeval and Renaissance theologians who
treated the carnival as pagan frenzy and a periodic outlet for
social emotions. The author then presents nineteenth-conceptions of
,,relics", which envisaged the carnival as one of the remnants
of the original rituals of agrarian magic, and the contemporary
calendar theory devised by Claude Gaignebet who claimed that the
carnival is a ritual sanctifying the return of spring and the
springtime liberation of souls. The second part of the study
discusses conceptions formulated by Hans Moser (the carnival as a
secular town holiday), works by Natalie Zemon Davies, Muriel
Laharie and Jean-Marie Fritz on the connections between the carnival
and the mediaeval feast of fools, the radical interpretation by
Dietz-Rudiger Moser, who treated the carnival as an
institutionalised liturgical holiday, the theory of the carnival and
carnivalisation proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin (the holiday of reversal),
and the sociopolitical contexts of the carnival described by
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie upon the example of the French town of
Romans.
Eleven
Carnival
Theses by
the above mentioned Dietz-Rudiger
Moser (translated from German by Marta Petrzykowska) outlines
chief arguments in favour of the Christian sources of the carnival,
derived from the “model of two states” by St. Augustine (De
civitate Dei).
The
following two texts refer directly and indirectly to the theory
expounded by Mikhail Bakhtin. In The Frames of
Comic
“Freedom” (translated
from English by
Włodzimierz Karol Pessel
), Umberto
Eco analyses the relations between the carnival and comicality,
while in The
Poetic of the
Carnival and the
Transition
Rites (translated
from the Russian original by Barbara Chmielewska) Rustam Kasimov points out the differences between the range of the
concepts of the “carnival”, the “carnival quality” (the
impact of the carnival upon literature) and “carnivalisation” (a
carnival-like perception of the world), and proposes to examine the
carnival within the perspective of Arnold van Gennep's vision of rites
de passage. The already classical essay Man
and Mask by Karl
Kerényi (translated from German by Anna Kryczyńska-Pham) does
not pertain to the
carnival directly, but has been included in “Carnivals in culture”
because the author analysed the mask visualised as the primeval tool
of man (used either to conceal oneself or to produce fear, but
predominantly as an instrument for the unifying transformation of
the world of the living into the world of the dead) - the mask is a
fundamental carnival attribute.
Masks are also the topic of an article by
the Swedish researcher Åsa
Boholm: Masked
Performances in the
Carnival of
Venice (translated from English by
Justyna Jaworska). This analysis of the functions fulfilled by the
mask exemplified by the carnival in Venice confirms Kerényi's
ascertainments relating to the original connections between the mask
and the world of the dead.
The
next two articles by eminent anthropologists discuss the carnival in
Brazil. In Carnival, Ritual and
Play in Rio de Janeiro (translated from
English by Iwona Kurz) Victor Turner considers the most important cultural performance in
Brazil within the context of the theory of play by Johann Huizinga
and Roger Caillois, and concludes that this is the only form of play
which contains simultaneously all four elements distinguished by
Caillois: agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx. A
further part of the article discusses the samba schools
in Rio. The analysis of their structure and function resorted to the
“structure - anti-structure” opposition which Turner had
frequently used in his research.
In
The
Carnival of Equality and the Carnival of Hierarchy (translated
from Portuguese by
Marta Kolankiewicz
) Roberto DaMatta
compares carnivals in two societies distinctively differentiated as
regards institutions, history and ideology: New Orleans and Rio de
Janeiro. The author perceives a sui generis paradox: in the
North American society of equality the carnival is an exclusive festivity
organised in a truly aristocratic manner, while in Brazil, a land
brimming with social contrasts an inequality, it is a fully
egalitarian festival which changes all rules of conduct, routine and
daily activity in order to make way for a reign of free expression
of emotions. The author concludes that the New Orleans carnival is a
curious attempt at a re-establishment of the principle of
differentiation within a society whose official credo excludes it,
while in Rio the carnival transforms daily hierarchy into the
magical equality of the fleeting moment. The article fully confirms
the hypothesis that studying carnival festivities can tell us much
about the essence of the social system in each “carnival”
country.
The
author of the last article entitled Origins
of Rituals and
Customs in the Trinidad
Carnival: African or
European?
(translation from the English by Błażej Dzikowski) is Hollis
Urban Liverpool, a researcher specialising in the carnival and,
at the same time, the “world calypso monarch” from Trinidad, who
maintains that the carnival in Trinidad and Tobago was not imported
from Europe but owes it origin to African slaves working on sugar
cane plantations, and that the majority of customs associated with
this festivity is African in form and function.
Maciej
Rożalski, Salvador, the Town of Capoeira
Capoeira blends together a game, a dance, a
battle, and meditation. It denotes a group of people - roda, an
orchestra playing music - bateria, and two dancers involved
in a game of blows and evasion, steered by the master - Mestre. The
dancers adapt the exchange of
thrusts to the rhythm of
the accompanying music, which becomes whatever they
desire. The presented article invites the reader to embark upon a
journey to the colourful world of Salvador, which is the cradle of
the titular art. First and foremost, however, it is an attempt at
capturing the very essence of Capoeira. By citing conversations with
the greatest masters of the art, and by reaching the very core of
the phenomenon, the author tries to depict this complex world, which
does not succumb to facile definitions. The frenzy of Capoeira,
which has started to reach us, does not signify merely striking
prowess or lithe young men capable of performing a series of
starling saltos, although this is the image frequently launched by
the press and television, Capoeira contains something more - culture
and history, together with their tantalising, vivid beauty; what we
desperately need is to learn how to understand others and how to coexist
with them. Capoeira has the power to set free emotions, previously
amassed and stored. The forms and masks, behind which we eternally
conceal ourselves, and which deform and control our relations with
the world, suddenly lose their meaning. There is no time to think
about what the other person wants from me, and vice versa. Music
and speed liberate self-assurance impaired by civilisation. That
what remains is only I and my dancing partner, as well as that
special type of relationship which emerges between us, and which
is the reason why I am compelled to question my identity.
Anna
E. Kubiak, New Age
Art
The author writes about New Age art,
currently increasingly popular. In her opinion, widely comprehended
New Age is a true child of contemporary culture, described by some
as postmodern. New Age culture, also known as the culture of the Age
of Aquarius, could be characterised by listing the following
features: chance, ambivalence, eclecticism, pluralism, the blurring
of boundaries, the toppling of classifications, anarchism, fluidity,
variability conceived as the essence of reality, the autonomy of the
elements, which do not comprise a cohesive whole, but rather
participate in a game of discourses, the predominance of the image
over the word, ephemerality, inconsequence, and nonconclusiveness.
New Age does not fit into any heretofore sociological or
anthropological category. The author also mentions “New Age
spirituality” and the role played by assorted traditions used in
the culture of Aquarius. The concept of New Age art is so wide that
it encompasses every domain of life and, the author claims,
constitutes the art of life itself. Anna E. Kubiak believes that
criteria for distinguishing New Age art include the relation between
the artist and the Aquarius environments, or at least sharing their
interests. The presented text brings the reader closer to New Age
art by demonstrating its roots, the “paths” of the culture of
the Other, forbidden culture, counter-culture, and culture for sale.
This is not an attempt at typology, since many works disclose mixed
inspirations, but an endeavour to understand a phenomenon by going
back to its sources.
Dorota Hall,
God Loves Fun. The Role of Laughter in New Age Culture
Laughter
resounds extremely frequently among New Age milieus. In the Society Art
of Life it appears prominent and, at the same time, involved
in a game of sensual experiences and the adoption of a new world
outlook by the followers. The author of the article treats laughter
as a ritual performed in the spirit of other Aquarius practices
associated with corporeal experiences. In a reference to the
conceptions launched by Geertz, she explains that New Age laughter
comprises a model in relation to truths pertaining to the
status of man's earthly existence, recognised by the laughing
person. She draws attention to the fact that the specificity of
Aquarius laughter emerges in its fullest form when it is treated as
a ritual model for - and when it becomes apparent that it
weakens the determination of the adopted statements about reality,
and relativises contents extracted from other rituals. Laughter
renders New Age distant from the possibility of constructing a
meta-narrative system. In the Art
of life this anti-system quality is additionally favoured by
Ravi Shankar, the spiritual authority of the Society, who
personifies the jester, and thus does not posses the power of
building ultimate theories that would offer an all-encompassing
explanation.
Małgorzata Just, “Art of the Awakened" - Between Magic and
Transcendence. Esoteric
Art within New Age Circles
The New Age movement has been examined and
described in assorted manners, but up to now not a single study has
considered its increasingly discernible aspect - the artistic
expression of its participants. The presented article attempts to
fill this gap.
Upon the basis of her own research, the
author develops the thesis that the question fundamentally linked
with the essence of the whole phenomenon involves the world outlook,
the life philosophy of artists shaped within the ideology of the Age
of Aquarius, as well as the path which they had traversed in order
to become unconventional therapists. The artists firmly believe that
their spiritually developed interiors render them capable of
suffusing their works with so-called positive vibrations, which are
to exert a beneficial impact on the recipients and reality; this is
the reason why New Age art, or rather esoteric art, contains a
certain dose of pragmatism, a feature which is the source of, i. e.
a non-elitist workshop. Creators can include both amateurs and
graduates of an Academy of Fine Arts, ready to join a single current
in which a distinction into amateur vel naive and
professional artists plays a slight role.
A presentation of the successive stages in
the creation of esoteric paintings demonstrates the way in which the
“awakened” artists focus on spiritual matters, and strive
towards expressing or using their transcendent experiences. As in
the case of all canvases, the instruments which they employ are
colour and shape, which, the artists maintain, possess great
significance for the impact subsequently exerted by the compositions.
The application of a given colour or symbol takes place due to the
painter's reference to his esoteric knowledge, or, if he is
submerged in a trance, to his subconsciousness.
Małgorzata
Baranowska, The Postcard. I Was
Here
The postcard harbours the ambition to
encompass the whole world. This is the reason why it is ideally
suitable for an abbreviated presentation of every situation about
which we would like to inform the addressee. The producers of
postcards try to meet such demands by resorting to assorted measures.
Numerous examples of postcards from the turn of the nineteenth
century depict the popular “I was here” motif. The author
discussed the forms of this motif and drew attention to the
requirements which it satisfied.
Andrzej
Pieńkos, The Artist's Home - a
Reliquary of Creativity: the John
Soane
Museum
The
Soane residence cannot be assessed in categories of architecture:
its creator transcended all limits of extravagance, even those which
one may encounter in the houses of Romantic artists. The
extraordinary character of Soane's own house is determined by the
fact that it constituted the home of the artist, his family and
servants, combined with the “official” seat of a recognised
architect, collector and academic teacher, and, finally, that it was
intended to be a museum, in other words, an ideal vision of his art.
Soane designed the house for himself and his collection, conceived
as his "life-long partner", which was to instruct students of
architecture and create an uniform model for linking all the arts -
an ideal pursued by the designer, Nevertheless, the content of the
Soane residence-museum does not end on this amazing insertion of
collections into residential architecture. The object was devised as
a special house: a sepulchre and, simultaneously, a monument of
immortality. To put it differently, it was envisaged as a reliquary
of creativity and art, understood as sacral activity, together with
its assorted sources, results and aids. Developing the conception
formulated ingeniously in the Dulwich mausoleum and gallery Soane
created a multi-motif narration of a house-monument-museum. He added
the “mortal” motif of his architecture, maintained in the capriccio
convention, by placing a fictitious grave of Padre Giovanni (the
Italian pseudonym of John Soane) close to a pharaon's sarcophagus
recently added to his collection.
Both the edifice and its interior were to
fulfill functions other than those of mere home and studio: they
were to house a collection (which, in turn, co-creates and
determines the residential interior), to mould the resident and his
guests, including those who will come after his death, and, finally,
to exemplify the idea that constituted the sense of the author's
life. The Soane house initiated a sequence of complicated temples of
the imagination - sites of original declarations made by Romanticism
- whose particularly rich yield took place at the turn of the
nineteenth century. Within this group it remains probably the most
well-conceived example and the most perfect embodiment of the ideal
of the narration of an artist's home.
Jan Gondowicz,
The Wormwood Star
A witty and informative gloss to the
enthralling statement made by Josif Brodski who, after a meeting
with other Nobel Prize laureates, declared that the best vodka in
the world comes from Sweden: “It is made of
'wormwood' -I don't know how to translate this into Russian.
It is not transparent but has the appearance of some sort of a grass
and resembles a tincture. The local population, for reasons unknown,
does not drink it” (S. Volkov, Conversations with Brodski). In
a commentary maintained in a truly detective spirit, and by
following linguistic, folklore and historical trails the author
pursues the beginnings and delirious history of this noble beverage.
It is truly rare for a connoisseur-taster to come across a
connoisseur-glossator.
Mariusz
Szymon Czaja, The End of the Word, Illness and Terrible
Doomsday. Apocalyptic Stories by Tadeusz Słobodzianek
An
attempted interpretation of symbolic structures created in texts by
Tadeusz Słobodzianek, a Polish contemporary playwright, from the
perspective of the category of time, The author uses sui generis detectors
of meaning in the form of three symbolic constructions taken from
the analysed texts, starting with the myth of the Golden Age and
discovering the presence of cyclical time, which has to be revived
by repeating archetypical gestures. Subsequently, he considers the
Searchers of the Holy Grail, who are already the followers of the
linear conception of time, but who wish to evade time in order to
reach the point of the wondrous transformation of unaccepted reality
into its ideal counterpart. The last of the figures cited by the
author, the End of the World, appears to be dominating, and
eschatological time assumes the part of ontical time in Słobodzianek's
dramas. The earlier analysed conceptions of time prove to be the
objects of assessment from the viewpoint of eschatological
“encroaching time”, entering into “the present” thanks to
the redeeming force of love. This is not to say that the analysed
texts are merely moralising; they cast light on certain mechanisms
of culture associated with various conceptions of time and problems
stemming from their confrontation in history.
Robert Kulpa, Carnival?
Camp and Gender in Drag Queen Show
A description of drag queen shows conceived as the
carnivalisation of certain situations in contemporary social life.
References to contemporary gender studies, i. a. gender cultural
identity (the “social superstructure” of biological sex)
assisted the author in analysing the titular shows. The exploitation
of the category of camp - a sui generis style characteristic
for a predilection for all that which is artificial and extravagant
- enabled him to compare drag shows with classical conceptions
relating to the institution of the carnival. R. Kulpa noted that
today it is rather difficult to consider the structural similarities
of the two phenomena (we may only observe certain fragmentary forms),
while existing analogies are to be found in the functions and goals
of drag queen shows. The most fundamental differences become
discernible in an analysis of the time and place encompassed by both
phenomena. The similarities, on the other hand, involve
cross-dressing, the reversal of behaviour and social and cultural
roles, fun and revelry. The best description is, in the opinion of
the author, offered by the expression “a topsy-turvy world”. It
is impossible to describe drag queen shows as a carnival, but it is
justified to speak about a “carnivalised” phenomenon.
Aleksandra
Banaszkiewicz, Magdalena Radkowska, Tomasz
Rakowski, Withering.
Creators
and Cadavers. An Introduction to the Anthropology of Tuberculosis
The consumptive is accompanied by an
extensive collection of symbolic associations. The appearance of
symptoms of withering and the loss of
body mass are discernible in the medicinal mixtures
seeping into the body. Tuberculosis is also surrounded by metaphors
of hair, phlegm and moisture. The body of the victim does not attain
its status instantly, and the emergence of its new counterpart
possesses symbolic premises. Such a gradual transformation is
visible in The Magic Mountain by T. Mann and the novels by M.
Gretkowska. The new body becomes a weightless, ethereal substance.
Its deterioration and striving towards an ascetic, translucent form
can be recognised as one of the aspects of the Romantic myth of
consumption. The contemporary image of corporeality to a great
extent preserves such an aesthetics and cultivation of the body,
rendered mythical; its modification becomes part of the
eternal motif of the negation of man's biological condition.
Włodzimierz
Karol Pessel, Melanesians
versus Farmers
An
example of a text rarely encountered among polish essays, and
similar to Bystroń's memorable book Tematy, które mi odradzano (Topics
I was Advised to Avoid). The author is not afraid to engage the
polymorphic knowledge and traditional workshop of the anthropologist
of culture for the purposes of studying issues disagreeable not only
in a scientific discourse, hut even in a conversation held by
friends. He deals primarily with physical impurity (dirt and bodily
excretions) contrasted with symbolic (ritual) impurity. He also
contrasts the Melanesians, that model primeval society, which modern
man associated stereotypically with unhygienic behaviour, with “farming”,
sexual pathology promoted on the Internet in a manner characteristic
for contemporary subcultures. By doing so, he depicts the aesthetic
and scientific obstacles which the anthropology of the excrement,
projected in this article, must tackle.
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